One of the more complex meditations on memory and forgetting after war, comes not from social science, international law or erudite essay, but from this year’s winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for literature, Kazuo Ishiguro, in his 2015 novel, The Buried Giant (2015). Set in an era following King Arthur’s demise, the characters inhabit a land beset by the fog of forgetting. The novel posits several ways to imagine the purpose of memory from the perspective of how its absence afflicts the story’s core characters.

A nuclear strike almost certainly qualifies as an act of genocide. Does a threat of nuclear attack constitute incitement to genocide?

This question is not new, but newly invigorated by today’s crises. In 2005, then-Iranian President Ahmadinejad generated great fervor stated, in a contested translation, that Iran would “wipe Israel off the map.” In some […]

Monuments to Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis or other Confederate icons tell a different story from that of the American dream of unending expansion of equality and justice. As documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the vast majority was erected by those committed to the history of prejudice and racism despite losing the war, by transforming it into the narrative of the Lost Cause. Defeat in battle transformed into a fight to control the peace. While commemoration began in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, monuments to the Lost Cause—many taking the same form of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville that was the provocation for the latest events in 2017—sprouted like poisonous mushrooms in the days after a storm. Construction of these symbols of the south surged at the turn of the last century, spiking in 1910 but continuing into the early 1940s, contemporaneous to the imposition of Jim Crow laws across the South.